The purpose of mbstring is for working with Unicode and legacy text
encodings; but Base64, QPrint, etc. are not text encodings and don't
really belong in mbstring. PHP already contains separate implementations
of Base64, QPrint, and HTML entities. It will be better to eventually
remove these non-encodings from mbstring.
Regarding HTML entities... there is a bit more to say. mbstring's
implementation of HTML entities is different from the other built-in
implementation (htmlspecialchars and htmlentities). Those functions
convert <, >, and & to HTML entities, but mbstring does not.
It appears that the original author of mbstring intended for something
to be done with <, >, and &. He used a table to identify which
characters should be converted to HTML entities, and </>/& all have a
special value in that table. However, nothing ever checks for that
special value, so the characters are passed through unconverted.
This seems like a very useless implementation of HTML entities. The most
important characters which need to be expressed as entities in HTML
documents are those three!
mbstring had an 'identify filter' for almost every supported text encoding
which was used when auto-detecting the most likely encoding for a string.
It would run over the string and set a 'flag' if it saw anything which
did not appear likely to be the encoding in question.
One problem with this scheme was that encodings which merely appeared
less likely to be the correct one were completely rejected, even if there
was no better candidate. Another problem was that the 'identify filters'
had a huge amount of code duplication with the 'conversion filters'.
Eliminate the identify filters. Instead, when auto-detecting text
encoding, use conversion filters to see whether the input string is valid
in candidate encodings or not. At the same type, watch the type of
codepoints which the string decodes to and mark it as less likely if
non-printable characters (ESC, form feed, bell, etc.) or 'private use
area' codepoints are seen.
Interestingly, one old test case in which JIS text was misidentified
as UTF-8 (and this wrong behavior was enshrined in the test) was 'fixed'
and the JIS string is now auto-detected as JIS.
Alex Dowad